American Desperado (13 page)

When they gave me crayons and asked me to draw something pleasant, I drew the woods, with stick-figure people in pajamas. I said, “This is my pleasant thing.”

It was obvious I was thinking of gooks in the woods, and I wanted to kill the gooks in the woods. They sent in a priest. I had no strong feelings about priests. I’d never interacted with one. He said, “None of your thoughts are in the right place.”

“Are they going to keep me locked up here forever?”

The priest said something very strange to me: “Your body is overrun with evil.”

I found this very unhelpful. “Why don’t you put your ass where I was, and then tell me what’s in my body? You fucking moron.”

“I just want to help you,” he said. “I apologize.”

The fact that this man apologized got my attention. The next day he returned and talked to me, without any mumbo jumbo. He said, “The powers that be are scared to let you go. They think you have not been rehabilitated to go among the general population. I want to help you get out.”

This priest came every day. We’d shoot the shit, but without any God crap. The man did help. I’m not saying he showed me the light, because I certainly didn’t go to church afterward. But he explained to me I needed to change my thinking when I answered the doctors’ tests.

A day came when the doctors gave me a new round of tests. Again, they asked me to draw something pleasant. I gave them a sunset. When they asked about my views on life, I became a flower child. I said, “I realize how important peace is. War is really bad.”

Their whole attitude changed. It’s funny, because these were army doctors. The army recruited me in jail after I was charged with attempted homicide. They trained me in better ways to murder and let me loose in the woods for a killing spree. They trained me to fly in the air so I could kill people that were hard to reach, and to
use Chinese guns so nobody could finger America for the murders. But to go home I had to pretend I liked sunsets and rainbows.

Once I understood the game, I played it. The doctors knew I’d killed a bunch of people, but they didn’t know my actual personality. If they did, they never would’ve let me out of the room.

I left the army in late 1968. My army service cleaned my record.
^*
I wasn’t a criminal no more. I was twenty years old and free. My mind wasn’t completely proper, but I was better off than most guys returning from Vietnam. I had a future. I knew I wasn’t going to be flipping burgers at McDonald’s.

*
In response to my Freedom of Information Act request for Jon’s military records, the National Archives and Records Administration replied that its technicians were unable to locate his records. I interviewed one person by phone, identified in the book as Steve Corker, who claimed to be the man who served with Jon in Vietnam, and I found records of the soldier identified in the book as George, who died from friendly fire as Jon described. I have viewed Jon’s medical records, and he does have a metal plate in his head. I have viewed records indicating that one of his associates was arrested in connection with the kidnapping and attempted murder case that Jon claims resulted in his entering the army. Jon’s sister, Judy, recalls his entering the military and returning from Vietnam. Police involved with Jon’s arrest in 1986 were told by informants on the street that Jon was known as a “psycho Vietnam vet.” Jon is an avid and skilled sky diver. Previously, as a reporter on military matters, I have encountered rare cases where records have been misplaced by the National Archives, but until Jon’s government records can be produced, his recollections of military service in Vietnam cannot be independently verified.

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JUNE 2009—FORT LAUDERDALE

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Jon emerges from his session with a therapist at a Broward County mental health center. A few months earlier, Jon’s previous wife, the mother of his son Julian, filed a motion to alter their custody agreement so she could have more time with Julian. Jon countersued, and a judge ordered Jon and his ex-wife to undergo psychological evaluation. Now Jon meets the therapist, a woman in her thirties, two times a week. I watch from the waiting area as Jon shakes her hand good-bye. She is attractive in a slightly disheveled grad-student way. Jon smiles broadly and, as he releases her hand, says something that makes her laugh. As we walk out to his car, he says, “She’s completely on my side, bro.”

Jon tells me he has shared everything with the therapist, including highlights of his tour in Vietnam.

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She asked me, “Do you ever think you’ll be at peace with yourself?”

I said, “How could I ever be at peace with myself? I just want to make myself calmer for my son’s sake.”

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What did you talk about today?

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Self-esteem. She asked me how I define self-esteem. I told her it’s the values you have of yourself, and what others think of your values.

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Was that the right answer?

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Who the fuck knows, bro? She seemed happy. She likes me. Obviously, I don’t tell her everything. I didn’t tell her about skinning people in Vietnam or beating that guy who hurt Julian.

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What guy hurt Julian?

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Two years ago Julian came back from his mother’s with bruises on his leg. It wasn’t his mother who hurt him. He told me a man who visited her house had kicked him for making too much noise. I knew who this man was. I had some guys pick him up off the street.

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What guys?

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Two kids who work as bouncers at Scarlett’s. They do odd jobs for me. They threw this piece of shit in the trunk of a car
and drove him on I-75. Every half hour they’d pull over, open the trunk, and hit him on his leg with a hammer. They did this many times but never said a word. Finally the dumb fuck got it. “I understand,” he said. “I’ll never hit the boy again.”
^*

They threw him in the weeds by the road, and that was that. He has not touched Julian since. So the doctors have their ways of doing things, and I got mine.

That’s one thing I learned in the mental ward after Vietnam. You need to get along with people. However much force you have, sometimes you need to play somebody else’s game. Other times force works best. You need to be smart about how to balance those things. I took that with me when I came back to the civilian world from Vietnam.

*
Scarlett’s Cabaret is a strip club in Broward County frequented by Jon.

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New York was a different city when I came back in 1968. Girls on the streets wore flowers. The squares who worked on Wall Street were growing their hair out. The beatniks had taken over. Even Dominic Fiore had joined the hippie movement. After his overdose that got us arrested and me sent to Vietnam, he did no time in prison, because when they sent me into the army and expunged my criminal record, the case against him was ruined. While I was off fighting gooks, Dominic started wearing tie-dyed shirts and took up the flute. He’d sit in Washington Square playing his flute, preaching love. But anyone who gave him shit, he would knock their teeth out. He was the same guy underneath the flowers in his hair. When he needed money for dope, he’d rob some hippies.

My uncles didn’t give a shit that I’d gone to Vietnam. To them, going to the army was the same as going to prison. What mattered was, I hadn’t ratted anybody out
when I was arrested. My second day back in New York, my uncle Sam had me out collecting debts. Instead of a gook in front of me, now it’s a white guy or a black guy who owes money. I wasn’t ecstatic going back to collections, but I needed the work.

Rocco Ciofani put me up at his apartment in Teaneck. While I was away, he had joined the Mafia as a soldier for the Bonannos, but he was still friendly with the Outcasts. Of those guys, Petey Gallione was such a bad junkie, he was always getting arrested for stupid things, and Jack Buccino was still living at his parents’ house, scheming and scamming.

Jack knew a guy who booked musical acts. He got the idea to go into the concert business. His idea was we would rent the old Fox Theater in Hackensack and bring in a band that was popular back then, Ten Years After.
^*

Jack got me involved, because he thought it would help clear my mind up from being in the army. The concert business turned out to be very easy. After we paid a radio station to make the ads for the show, we sold every ticket. This gave me an idea. I said to Jack, “You know what? Why don’t we print up an extra thousand tickets and sell these, too?”

Jack and me brainstormed it out. We had two shows booked for the band, one after the other on the same night. We decided to oversell only the second show, so any problems would only happen later in the night. We put an ad on the radio that said, “Due to printer error, we found extra tickets which are on sale now.”

We sold all of them. At the first show we had the time of our lives. Alvin Lee was a phenomenal guitar player. The crowd went crazy. After we started to let the people in for the second show, we knew the shit was going to hit the fan. It was obvious there was no way you could fit an extra thousand people in there.

We went and got Petey, who we’d hired to be in charge of security, and said, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

We ran. The fire marshal closed down the show. There was mayhem outside the theater, with angry kids, fire engines, police cars. We drove away, laughing our asses off.

Later, the city sent lawyers after us. They said, “You’ll never again put on a concert in Hackensack.”

As if we cared.

A
BOUT THAT
time I ran into a kid I knew from New Jersey named Howie Tannenbaum. He wasn’t an Outcast, but he was interested in different illegal things. After the Ten Years After concert, Howie asked me if I would help him set up some hippies to buy weed and then rip them off. Howie was a good kid. Later, he got caught in a bad case, and I guess he was afraid of going to prison, so he ended up locking himself in a hotel room and killing his girlfriend and then himself. But when I worked with him, he was good. We did a couple of rip-offs together in Manhattan, and Howie brought in a friend of his to help out, Junior Sirico,
^*
who became an actor on
The Sopranos
.

Junior was a nut even then. If you see on
The Sopranos
how Junior played a wacked-out wiseguy who wore his hair slicked back on the sides, that’s exactly how Junior really was on the streets. Junior was very good. He was a knife guy, not a gun guy. He always had switchblades, and he knew how to use them.

Junior was a soldier for a guy named Fat Anthony.
^†
I mean no disrespect, but Fat Anthony was not good to the guys who worked for him. He’d slap the piss out of his own people for no reason. Junior could really take care of himself, but he couldn’t raise a hand to Fat Anthony. He was the boss. I felt terrible for Junior.

As I got friendlier with Junior, I saw that Fat Anthony had a very nice business going. Fat Anthony controlled a bunch of fag
bars in New York. In the late 1960s, the fag joints were changing. They weren’t just for fags anymore. They were turning into discos. The fags still went, but so did all the normal people. Discos were a big business. They were growing up and down Manhattan so fast, a lot of them didn’t have any Mafia control.

I went to my uncle Sam and told him I wanted to get into the nightclub business. My uncle Sam talked it over with my uncle Joe, and he went to Carlo Gambino. They all agreed I should work in the nightclub side of the business. Collecting debts for my uncle had been part-time work. When my uncles talked to Gambino, this was different. I had shown ambition. I’d come up with an idea. It was a pretty big idea, too. I couldn’t be one guy taking over a club. I had to work with the family. Within months after leaving the army, I became a soldier for the Mafia.

*
The British blues band, featuring Alvin Lee, that would perform at Woodstock.

*
Anthony “Junior” Sirico, after an arrest in 1971 for armed robbery, became interested in acting and played Paulie on
The Sopranos
from 1999 to 2007.

†
Anthony “Fat Anthony” Rabito, reputed Bonanno family soldier, was convicted in the Donnie Brasco case, later fictionalized in the 1997 movie
Donnie Brasco
.

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